In the good parts of town you hardly ever see them, but in the bad parts they are still everywhere. Brown, greasy, horizontal lines on the walls of rotting, mildewed buildings, reminding us even now of the Great Flood. If you look at the lines carefully enough, you may notice that they, though multiple, often visually coalesce into three broad bands. The bands tell a story. The highest band marks the high point of the water hours after the levees broke and the storm surge poured into New Orleans. After a day or so, the water receded to a lower level as Katrina passed inland, creating the lowest band. There it stood for almost a month, which is why this lowest band is usually the darkest and most distinct. A month later Hurricane Rita brushed the city on its way to landfall in Texas, bringing a new, smaller surge with it, and raising the standing water by a foot or so in some places. Thus the third, and middle band.
In New Orleans, water lines tell us something about a building. They tell us how much water the building took on, and more importantly, that the building has been untouched for the last two years. One of the first things people do when they start to rehab a flooded property is scrub off the water lines. It isn't surprising that, after two years, the city is still recovering from Hurricane Katrina, but it is surprising that there are so many houses with water lines, so many unreconstructed houses. Katrina is still one of the leading issues in the local news broadcast every single night, and makes the front page of the local paper every single day. Every story, every crime, every social problem is somehow linked to Katrina. Southeastern Louisiana is not stuck on August 29, 2005, but it seems to be stuck sometime in the spring of 2006. Stuck in a stage of early recovery, marking time like the recovering drunk who wakes up each morning and tallies up another day of sobriety. There is no looking ahead; there is only today. Let's just get through today.
The problem is, it has been this way for almost two years. The average person likes to look forward, to have a future, not to scratch out an hourly existence like an aborigine in the desert. But now, in the heart of hurricane season 2007, day-by-day is all the New Orleanian has. The levees are not what they should be. Another Katrina now would end things once and for all, and everyone knows it. The Army Corps of Engineers has a plan to protect New Orleans against a hurricane of Katrina's intensity, but plan will not be reality until 2011. There will be a lot of tropical disturbances between August 2007 and 2011. And the Corp's plan at this moment is nothing more than a promise from the federal government. I think we all know what that is worth nowadays.
In the months after Katrina, the initial stages of shock and grief were gradually replaced with a mixture of despair and hope. The despair is obvious, but the hope needs explanation. Many of us thought that in death there could be renewal, and we hoped that this disaster might clear out the bad as well as the good. Death is not all bad. It makes way for the young and the fresh sprouts of spring; it forcibly does away with old ideas and calcified customs and brings sunlight to the new.
The storm, for example, reduced the murder rate in the city to zero for a time. Some of us dared to hope that the drug dealers were gone for good, or at least could be kept out. Perhaps, we dreamed, the drug gangs and their supply systems were as hopelessly mangled in the flood waters as our bridges and homes were. With careful rebuilding, the thinking went, we could exclude this evil for a time, maybe for ever. As it turned out, we were terribly, terribly mistaken. The criminals came back, and the drugs came back. Flooded and abandoned houses are now crack houses. The crime is worse than it has ever been, and the police and justice system seem helpless to do anything about it.
The storm also blew away the New Orleans public school system. The New Orleans School Board was absolutely the worst elected body I have ever seen in the United States; prior to the storm it was millions of dollars over budget and for all its overruns was nonetheless one of the worst-performing school districts in America. Sixty-eight of the 108 public schools in the city were rated as "academically unacceptable" by the State Board of Education in 2005. Forty-eight percent of high school students dropped out, and many of those who stayed in school couldn't read anyway (One New Orleans school had a valedictorian with an ACT score of 11. The national average score is about 17.). The State Board was considering a complete system takeover before Katrina hit. The system's finances were already ordered into a form of receivership, and were being managed by the New York accounting firm Alvarez and Marsal. Accountants from that company were calling the school systems books among the worst they had ever seen. Louisiana ranks in the bottom 5 nationally in most educational surveys. So if the state of Louisiana considered the New Orleans educational system unacceptable, execrable is likely a more accurate word.
Katrina, however, put an end to this awful system. Individual schools were reopened as independent charter schools. In November of 2005 the state took 107 schools away from city control and created a state-run Recovery School District. The RSD seems to have done a reasonable job of finding responsible administrators to organize schools and get them running again. The city offered bonuses for out-of-state teachers to come in and help out with the recovery, and hundreds of promising and idealistic recent college grads answered the call.
There was also hope, and continues to be hope, that Katrina will help blow the corruption out of our beleaguered state. The trend towards clean government started before Katrina, and has accelerated since. In 2001 former Governor Edwin Edwards went to jail. In 2004 he was followed by Ronald Bodenheimer, a local judge who was convicted of framing a man for drug possession. About the same time the home of Jacques Morial, the brother of former Mayor Marc Morial, was raided by federal investigators. The ex-Mayor's uncle, Glenn Haydel, was sentenced on corruption charges in 2006. There are widespread rumors that the ex-Mayor himself may see his day in court. All this was followed by the raiding of the home and office of Congressman William Jefferson, and his indictment for bribery. A few months ago a former member of the New Orleans School Board pleaded guilty to corruption charges, and just last week City Councilman Oliver Thomas did the same. U.S. Senator David Vitter has his neck on the block for prostitution. Some might argue that this is simply evidence that Louisiana is as corrupt as its reputation would have it, but it is also proof that a proper accounting is finally underway.
Another helpful post-storm change: The multiple political boards that divided duties of levee upkeep were, after a huge effort, consolidated into two districts. Instead of being run by political appointees, the new Levee Board will now consist of scientists and engineering experts -- the kind of people who should have been managing the levee system all along.
Mardi Gras has come back, and appears to be alive and well. The Saints returned for last fall's football season, and this year the New Orleans Hornets will be playing basketball here, too. The port of New Orleans is back in full operation, and seafood production, especially shrimp and oysters, appears to be rebounding. According to New Orleans restaurant critic Tom Fitzmorris, there are 853 locally owned restaurants open in the city, up from 809 prior to the storm. (Figuring importantly among those are R&O's, Mandina's, and Clancy's -- my most beloved New Orleans restaurants.) Hotel capacity is rising to pre-Katrina levels. And this past week, Waldorf-Astoria bought the old Roosevelt hotel and intends to spend $100 million to bring it up to world-class status.
Those are the bright spots. Darkness, however, abounds. After the brief period of non-existent crime after Katrina, the murder rate has skyrocketed. And the city government seems completely unable to cope. Since his improbable re-election last year, Mayor Ray Nagin has vanished from public sight, saying little or nothing about crime except that the police are working hard to stop it. Meanwhile the District Attorney's office has only secured 3 convictions for the 161 murders that took place in the city in 2006 (that's right, three), and the DA has the nerve to claim that he is being scapegoated for systemic problems. (That's the one thing New Orleans has in abundance -- excuses.) The city is still without a crime lab, as FEMA holds up funding earmarked to help reconstruct the staggered police system in red tape. The DA's office can't try a lot of cases because it does not have the money to hire enough lawyers, and worse, the city cannot find enough defense attorneys for defendants.
The city's recovery plan has yet to struggle out of the gate, and this has forced citizens to make decisions without knowing what the government intends to do. Thousands are still waiting for assistance from the Road Home Program, a government grant project that was supposed to provide funding for individuals to rebuild. Thus far, only $2.8 billion of over $6 billion allocated has been spent. Only 37,000 grants have been made for 160,000 claims. As the money trickles in at a painfully slow rate, some citizens who intended to rebuild at first are now slowly moving away. The Road Home program is currently $2.9 billion short if it pays out all qualified claims, not because of corruption but because the need is so much greater than originally thought. George W. Bush's response has simply been to say New Orleanians have gotten enough money already. Donald E. Powell, Bush's coordinator for the Katrina recovery, has been a little more specific, arguing that the shortage has occurred because Louisiana officials have been basing awards on need, instead of excluding wind damage as the Bush administration required . Imagine that. A federal hurricane recovery program that excludes wind damage. Only the Bushes would think of something so harmful and stupid.
Which brings us to another disappointment. Many of us dared to hope that, after the horribly botched federal disaster response, President Bush would, out of a self-proclaimed Christian man's sense of shame, make an extra effort to atone for the early errors. Hardly. On August 29, 2007, our leader makes his 13th appearance on the Gulf Coast since the hurricane. By comparison, over the course of his presidency, he has spent 319 days on vacation as President, or 20 days for every day he has spent in New Orleans. And by the way, he went on vacation the day before Katrina hit.
I have focused my comments on the City of New Orleans because New Orleans, as sorry a state as it is in, is vital enough yet to come back. Before Katrina I lived in St. Bernard Parish, just east of New Orleans and closer to the eye of the hurricane. St. Bernard was a blue collar community of 68,000 before the storm, composed mostly of fishermen, craftsmen, and oilfield workers. Today about 20,000 are left. Probably 75% of the buildings in the parish are still unrepaired. The only hospital has been razed. Of the 30 or 40 doctors that worked there, only 8 remain in a single clinic, a cluster of FEMA trailers in an old Wal-mart parking lot. There is talk of possibly opening a new hospital in 2011. This is a community that was completely shattered by the storm, and I have begun to doubt that it will ever come back. In my old subdivision only about a fourth of the houses appear to be occupied, and we used to live in a relatively wealthy area. In the poor sections, there is no one.
Two years after Katrina, the New Orleans area has reached a crossroads, if not an outright crisis. Progress has been slow, and after a while, even the most patient and determined people will tire of the endless struggle and quietly shuffle away. The city population has been increasing, slowly. The New Orleans population has reached about 60% of its pre-storm level. St. Bernard is probably at about 30%. Overall the metropolitan area is about 80-85% of pre-Katrina levels. This is not terrible, given everything that has happened, but it belies a slower, more alarming trend of educated people slowly leaving town. That 11,300 homes were up for sale in June and only 1,029 were sold suggests that more middle and upper class people are headed out than in. The oil business, which has been slowly consolidating in Houston for decades, is leaving town faster than ever. The port of Orleans has lost some ground to the competing ports in Houston and Mobile, Alabama. Very little big business is coming in to replace the lost jobs.
New Orleans' greatest problem is that, two years after Katrina, there has not been a definite commitment to recovery. Local and state leaders have floated ideas, but it seems that no one has the political courage to make the very hard decisions that need to be made, such as which neighborhoods and schools should be abandoned, or what new building codes need to be enacted to minimize hurricane damage. Even a recent property tax reform intended to spread the tax burden more equitably has led to considerable grumbling. If people resist simple property tax re-assessments, how will they handle real reform?
The federal government has done some things, but its commitment has not been encouraging. Consider that the White House has agreed so far only to restore the levee system to pre-Katrina levels. In theory, the levees before the storm were supposed to protect the city against the equivalent of a Category 2 or weak Category 3 storm. Stronger storms than that frequently appear in the Gulf, so this announcement has heightened concerns rather than calmed them. There is funding for a study to determine what it would take to strengthen the levees to Category 5 hurricane protection, or a 500 year flood, but that is all it is -- a study.
Businesses won't relocate to New Orleans over a mere study. And former residents (myself included) will not consider rebuilding without credible assurances that Hurricane Katrina will not happen again. Without adequate flood protection it will be impossible to obtain affordable flood and home insurance, and this uncertainty is strangling the rebuilding process. A real commitment to strong levees on the federal level would ease those concerns and make the city a more attractive investment opportunity.
Some would argue that New Orleans, given its location, should not be protected against a Category 5 storm. Economists pointed out only days after Katrina (it still offends me that they could not wait a respectful length of time to make this observation!) that strengthening flood protection only encourages people to build in high risk areas, and thus creates the potential for more disasters in the future. This may be true, but if so -- if America thinks New Orleans is not worth rebuilding -- New Orleanians deserve to be told this honestly. This state of half-commitment is killing the city slowly and horribly, and that is not right.
I confess that I am sensitive to the efficiency argument. Business and good government are all about allocation of scarce resources, about getting the most out of what you've got. No one likes waste. But efficiency can become a substitute for morality, an excuse for hurting people when the only motivation is personal greed. Thus an auto manufacturer can fire 10,000 American workers, move a plant to Mexico, in the name of efficiency. No one questions the suffering involved, or who gets the saved dollars.
If the money saved by abandoning New Orleans went to end malaria worldwide, or to improving schools in the poor rural South, that would be one thing. If it is used to buy more DVDs and flat panel TVs, or worse, fattens the paychecks of Fortune 500 CEOs, what is the benefit? If I thought for a moment the efficiency proponents would take the money saved not building levees and use it to establish universal healthcare in the U.S, I would give them serious pause. But that will never happen, and we all know it. Our country will always be awash in petty luxuries like DVDs, and our streets will always be clogged with the luxury cars of millionaires, whether New Orleans has decent levees or not. But universal healthcare? Let's not hold our breath. Before the hurricane, St. Bernard was a relatively poor community. I do not doubt that if St. Bernard were simply abandoned in the name of economic efficiency, the thousands that live there would simply go be poor somewhere else. That vaunted efficiency may help someone, but it won't be them.
I have lived in New Orleans on and off for most of my life. It is hardly the perfect place. But it is a place apart from most of the United States. Increasingly, our country has been homogenized, and the pace of this homogenization has been accelerating. Our nation is turning into a sprawling suburbia of strip malls, overpasses, and Wal-marts, and not enough of us care. If someone dropped you on street corner in Atlanta, in Dallas, in Los Angeles, in St. Louis, how long would it take you to figure out where you are? If you were in a mall, you never, ever would. The radio would be no help; TV would be of litte help. Even local newspapers increasingly look alike. Most Americans do not live in the town they were born in, and many have lost the attachment to place that is everywhere in New Orleans.
According to the 2000 census, the American city with least transient population was Vacherie, Louisiana, a small town on the river between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Among the 50 states, Louisiana ranked second, after Pennsylvania, among states with the most native-born citizens. People who live here want to stay here. They love the food, the culture, the music, and their heritage. They don't want to leave it and move to a "nice" place. The world is full of nice places, but only one place is home.
If New Orleans was different before Hurricane Katrina, the storm experience has bound the city together like nothing before. No city has endured this same collective experience in recent memory. This experience, this collection of stories, could generate a remarkable spirit of confidence and cooperation if the recovery kicked into high gear. Instead, all this potential for unique, creative energy is being wasted through indifference and incompetence.
America will not survive as a nation because all of its citizens are alike. We will survive because we are diverse. From diversity comes creativity, fusion of ideas, and revolution. From similarity comes sterility, rot, and failure. We should be actively encouraging individuality, encouraging cultural diversity, because this has always been our strength. I find our indifference to diversity as perplexing as our sometime hostility to immigrants, who have also contributed mightily to what we are today.
Diversity is not efficient in the economic sense. Yet it is the way of nature. Evolution, after all, is wasteful. Thousands of organisms live and die so those rare few with competitive advantages can survive and flourish. How many proto-humans walked on all fours before a very few stood up? How many nation-states failed before the first democratic republic took root? If nature favored only efficiency, there would be no such thing as intelligence because admiring statues and mapping the stars is hardly efficient. A tiger is efficient. A cockroach is efficient. A ballet dancer is not.
In the last year, many have expressed concern over the plight of the honey bee. Perhaps you have heard this story -- throughout the United States bee hives have been disappearing. Not simply dying, but disappearing. Twenty-two states have reported drastic, and sometimes catastrophic drops in bee populations, with some beekeepers losing more than 90% of their hives for no obvious reason. The bees do not die, they simply abandon the hive and disappear. This phenomenon has acquired a name -- Colony Collapsing Disorder, or CCD -- and recent evidence suggests that the problem may be a complete breakdown in the bee's immune system. Some have suggested that it is an AIDS for bees.
I, like many scientifically conscious people, was distressed by the news of CCD. I have always liked honey bees, and find them beautiful and fascinating creatures. When I was about 10 a hive of bees swarmed my back yard. I was afraid of the swarm, until my father assured me that this was a natural process and that bees are much more docile and useful than their reputations suggest. And in fact this turned out to be the case; the bees took up residence in an old cyprus in the marsh behind our house, and quietly lived there for years. Many times I came within a few feet of the opening of this hive and watched with fascination as the bees harmlessly and busily slipped past me.
In my reading on CCD, I was surprised to learn that bees are very nearly extinct in the wild. I had no idea, and I am certain most people do not know this. People who claim to have been stung by honey bees are usually the victims of other stinging insects or bee look-alikes, such as the hornet or the wasp. What most people see in their gardens are not bees, but bumblebees. If you see a bee in your garden, this means almost certainly that there is a beekeeper in your neighborhood. Wild bees have been virtually extinct in the U.S. since 1994.
It is remarkable that an insect that most people are convinced is common in fact only exists in captivity. How could we be so mistaken? And how could we go on for so long without even noticing the extinction? And bees are not the only animals that are disappearing before our eyes. Frogs, and in fact most amphibian, populations are declining rapidly. The Audubon Society estimates that songbird populations have fallen by 50%, and in some cases by nearly 90%, in many areas of the country since the 1950s. I don't think very many people have noticed this either.
Which brings us back, oddly enough, to New Orleans. I feel New Orleans is endangered the way frogs, bees, and songbirds are. Its culture, and the culture of the Cajuns who live nearby, is dissolving before our eyes, and no one seems to be paying attention. Human cultural diversity is just as important to our survival as animal diversity is, and we are losing both. Deniers abound: people who think the data is phony, people who think declines are cyclical and nothing to worry about, and people who think species die as a part of the natural order of things. There may be a grain of truth in all of these objections. But all three ignore the basic truth that diversity is required for innovation and survival. A people that has lost its diversity is simply waiting around for extinction.
Our original national motto, E pluribus unum, means "out of many, the one." Our founding fathers chose this motto because they understood the meaning of diversity, even 100 years before Darwin. The many is a necessary precondition for the existence of the one. Diversity first, then unity. If we do not preserve that which is unique among us, there is not much more to be said about our identity.
Preserving New Orleans should be part of our national mission, because first of all, we can, and second of all, if we can justify letting it die in the interest of national economic efficiency, we can justify letting practically anything go for the same reason. We don't really need national parks, or clean rivers, or an educated majority, or even racial equality for that matter. None of these are paying propositions. Some of our most productive years, economically speaking, were at a time when the rights of blacks were actively and unapologetically suppressed. So why do right, except for the inconvenient fact that we are sinners if we don't?
I do not want to be part of a country that turns its head in a few decades and realizes that the wild New Orleans as it was is gone with the honeybees. To find that what is left of that unique culture exists in captivity here and there around the country, and in numerous textbooks, but that the real place is now a fossil. Maybe not completely lifeless, since the French Quarter could always be converted into Colonial Willamsburg or Main Street at Disneyworld, but abandoned in spirit, and no longer a renegade sprig on the American bough.
Two years since Katrina, and recovery is nowhere near complete. In many areas, it has yet to start. On this the second anniversary of Katrina, a ragged few will be making the rounds, hat in hand, once again asking for help. I know everyone is tired of hearing about it, and believe me, we are tired of having to ask. Before long, this asking will stop, either because the rebuilding is complete and all is well, or because the city has died and no one has come by to check the pulse. I wish today I had the confidence to tell you which way it will go.
From the Guardian (London, UK), I love this:
Meanwhile, an international people's tribunal has been convened to take testimony from victims. The tribunal is being spearheaded by legal activists trying to build a case under international law accusing the United States of human rights abuses during and after Katrina.
I would be glad to testify.